Ten years ago, I had just finished bringing out the top-selling PC security
deviceCentel's Net/Assureand was moving to help launch
secure eCommerce on the newly public Information Superhighway. I too thought
that security products were the answer.

Not anymore.

Ten years ago, the most important commercial asset on the Internet was reputation.
Early Web sites were just electronic copies of annual reports or product spec
sheets. The biggest damage came from someone hacking in and defacing one of
two pictures on a home page. (Sometimes companies did this to themselves. When
IBM launched its first Web page, they put up a "large" picture of
then-CEO Lou Gerstner. However, the image was so large that most people couldn't
even load the page, and if they did, their browsers could only display a feature
or twoan ear or a nose or a chin.)

Constant-Vigilance Key Questions: CEO Focus

How has your infrastructure matched the changes in your business these
past 10 years?

Who (besides you) is responsible for managing your corporate risk?

What changes do you track proactively that could be affecting your business?

What security-related changes are you tracking, and what do you do with
the results?

Who on your board understands and cares about your risk governance?

Even though this may seem like a pointless exercise in nostalgia, I do have
a method to my madness: We are not through the cycle of change brought about
10 years ago. Rather, we are right in the middle of it. Without maintaining
constant vigilance, no security is safe. And now that operations, threats,
and countermeasures quite often cross borders, you suddenly need to be vigilant
on a lot more information in a lot more places. To do that, you need a system.

Not Anymore, Continued

Constant change is relentless in global corporate security; overtime
regulations, threats, countermeasures, and the technology facilitating all of it
morph to higher levels of magnitude and complexity. This inexorable progression
needs to be figured into your company's global corporate security strategy.
Five years ago you might have been more willing to take risks. Why? Risks were
less significant than today. In 1988, there were roughly 100 reported security
incidents via the Internet, and by 1996 there were nearly 350 in just the third
quarter. Today incidents per year are in the millions, and these intrusions do
not even begin to touch the issue of piracy. Nearly 40 percent of all the
world's software is pirated, and in countries such as Pakistan and China
those rates eclipse the 80 and 90 percent marks, respectively.

A typical organization with 100 servers and 3,000 PCs behind a firewall will
generate 10 million security events a month. Of these, 500 to 600 require human
intervention, only 50 will involve some malicious intent, and just 2 will have
caused a problem.

John Schwarz, President, Symantec, San Jose

Every element of charting a courseregulations, personal liability,
corporate governance, greater awareness of the damage caused by threats, and
greater reliance on computer networks to function as a businesshave
significantly evolved. In the past year, you might have asked your CFO about a
potential violation of Zimbabwe's data privacy act, and he or she said not
to sweat hiring a lawyer to descend upon Harare, but check this year and see
what she says. Regulations are in constant flux.

To outpace change and to realize ultimate ROSI from your global corporate
security strategy, remaining constantly vigilant on the following four fronts is
critical:

Threats

Countermeasures

Regulations and legal frameworks

Technology

Threats are evolving fast, but by the time you read about them in your
morning paper or news brief, you are already behind the curve. You need to have
some insight into what is around the next corner (and the one after that). And
given the very nature of the threats, it is mandatory to call your security
package complete.

Luckily for you, countermeasures are quickly evolving. Not only do the
biggest names in security products and services develop new tools, but there are
also numerous smaller companies scattered around your world that will save you
time, money, and significant headaches (or worse). Regulations and their various
legal frameworks are written in sand at best right now. Not only are the
"regs" different in every country you do business in, they also differ
in the same countries, from day to day. Compound that with the evolving legal
frameworks that you are relying on to protect you, which change from court case
to court case, and from political leader to political leader. I know of one
company that relied on one-year-old business intelligence for some operations in
Bolivia, only to arrive to a changed government and legal system that disallowed
everything they had planned to do there. The biggest mistake is assuming that
your laws will work where your data goesan assumption that
could cost you significantly.

Finally, your COO will say that the only thing remaining constant from your
technology providers over the years is the brand. Software is rewritten,
acquisitions and mergers are common, and suddenly you are running a completely
new information system after an upgrade. This can and does offer real challenges
to your organization, and the best way to turn these changes into positives is
to gear up with advance warning, advance copies, and advance planning. Do not be
fooled by the sticker on the box or the logo on the startup screen; your
technology is changing as you read this.

Constant Vigilantes: Where to Find Them

TechnologyYour tech group

ThreatsA trusted third party

CountermeasuresYour security group

RegulationsYour legal group

Even as you consider the people you will need, it is also critical to
remember that the four fronts of constant vigilance, which are changing today,
tomorrow, and forever, are out of your sphere of effective control, but they are
within your sphere of adaptive control. However, you must know what is happening
in each of these areas, and ROSI within constant vigilance is gauged by how cost
efficiently you acquire this knowledge.

Deputize to Realize ROSI

You should be aware that in many cultures it is not appropriate to question
authority. Doing what you are told and following orders is still the preferred
management style in some countries in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Central
and South America, and the Asia Pacific areas. People are more used to
questioning orders from a security perspective in places such as the United
States and Canada. This questioning of the status quo is critical after your
corporation and your global security strategy are distributed throughout the
world. There are too many nuances at work for you to maintain a handle on them
all, and you need people who will come to you and say, "This won't
work because of this." You need to go the extra mile when training and
managing and find ways to specifically solicit the input you are going to need
based on this cultural difference.

Ideally, these sectors are delegated, with specific reporting reaching up
through the CSO. I have enjoyed success delegating each of the four to different
members of my staff. For instance, in nearly any company, there are staffers who
scour the chat rooms, list serves, and Web sites of technology companies. I
would just create a process whereby I alerted them of information I wanted or
needed and information that could be discarded. Although it takes some
back-and-forth dialogue at first, soon you will have initiated a reliable,
free-flowing channel of information.

Identify someone in your technology group, deputize that person as your
information asset, train him or her as you want, and then let that person do
what he or she loves to do. Each month, hold a pizza party in the evening to
debrief and share information. It is fun, everybody learns something, and those
you have deputized have a vested interest and role in helping the company adapt.

Tracking threats necessitates a more exhaustive route, and this cost is best
shared with otherslots of others. Imagine trying to staff a team tasked
with watching the development and deployment of every threat around the world.
The bill for pizza and Coke would raise the eyebrows of your CFO. Luckily, there
are a precious few companies that do this on behalf of hundreds and thousands of
clients around the world, and this allows them to employ a large enough staff,
vast enough technology, and deep enough experience to provide the right
information at the right time and in the right manner. After you have deputized
your information asset infrastructure, these considerations must be correlated
with your business requirements. It demands a routine loop back to department
heads and business owners to let them know what has changed. In turn, they
should report on what has altered for them and, in light of the latest global
security intelligence, what level of risk they are now willing to live with.
Ultimately, they are the ones who stand to gain or lose from the process. This
virtuous circle, comprised of trend spotting, reporting, adapting, and
correlating is what I call constant vigilance.